The MG folks are more familiar with the details, but I am including the other
big lists, since they are also affected. Basically what happened is that
someone on the MG list set up a vacation responder that sent its "out of
town" message to the MG list, not to the original sender or to mgs-owner.
The latter address, mgs-owner, is where it should have gone, one reason for
that is to avoid such incidents as happened last week.
So someone sends a message to the MG list, which goes to all recipients,
including the soon to be vacationing fellow. His program sends a response
back to the MG list informing of the absence. This response is sent to all
the recipients of the MG list, including the soon to be vacationing fellow.
His program sends a response back to the MG list informing of the absence.
This response is sent to all the recipients of the MG list, including the soon
to be vacationing fellow. His program sends a response back to the MG list
informing of the absence. This response is sent to all the recipients of the
MG list, including the soon to be vacationing fellow. Well, if you don't get
the picture by now, there's probably little hope for you.
Normally the list server here is set up to avoid such silliness. One side
effect of this is that many of you who blindly hit your mailer's reply key
end up sending your treasured comments into the bit bucket, rather than sending
them to the list, as you assume you are doing. So if you often reply to mail
and never see it on the list, take heed.
At any rate, the looping continued for about 450 to 500 messages. I actually
caught it fairly early so that it didn't get out of hand. One of the first
things I did after just turning off mail on the server was move all the aol
address to the digest list. Why? Simple. AOL has a 100 message limit on
their user's mailboxes. So for each of the 75 or so AOL subscribers on the
MG list, assuming they had just cleaned out all their moments before, the first
100 messages would have been delivered as nornal
|